The Stone Crusher

by Jeremy Dronfield

  Bergen‑Belsen was one of the last handful of concentration camps remaining on German‑held soil. By the time Gustav Kleinmann arrived, the camp, designed for only a few thousand, had swollen beyond all sense or reason, and despite thousands of deaths every month from starvation and disease—seven thousand in February, eighteen thousand in March, nine thousand in the first days of April—the living population had climbed to over sixty thousand souls, existing among piles of unburied corpses in an atmosphere rife with typhus. In Himmler’s peculiar mind, he was saving them, trying to win favor with the Allies by show‑

  ing himself merciful to the Jews rather than the architect of their mass murder.6

  Into this boiling mass of humanity, Gustav and the other survivors of Mittelbau‑Ellrich were to be driven. Many had not survived the journey, and there was the usual cargo of corpses to be unloaded from the train. As they 294265XGB_STONE_CS6_PC.indd 295

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  marched from the station toward the camp, an astonishing thing happened that was both terrible and wonderful. The column of ghosts met another marching in the same direction; they were all Hungarian Jews—men, women, children, all starving and wretched. Many of the Ellrich survivors were Hungarian also, and to Gustav’s wonder, first one person then another and another from one column recognized relatives in the other. They broke ranks and ran to them, calling their names. Beloved friends, mothers, sisters, fathers, children, long separated and thinking their dear ones dead, found them again on the road to Belsen. It was both joyous and heartrending, and Gustav could not find the words to describe what he saw—“one can only imagine such a reunion.”

  What he would not give to be so reunited with Tini and Herta and Fritz. But not here, not in this place.

  There were no anchors left, no touchstones, no certainties; even the regime of the camp system had broken down. Bergen‑Belsen was full to bursting, and the fifteen thousand who arrived from the Mittelbau camps were turned away by the commandant, Josef Kramer. Their SS escorts found accommodation for them at a Wehrmacht panzer training school a kilometer away, between Belsen and Hohne. Its barracks were pressed into service as an overflow concentration camp, designated Belsen Camp 2, under the command of SS‑Captain Franz Hössler, who had accompanied the transports from Mittelbau.7 This man was notorious; a thuggish‑looking individual with a jutting chin and sunken mouth, before Mittelbau Hössler had been in command of one of the women’s sections in Auschwitz‑Birkenau, participating in selections and gassings and countless acts of individual murder and brutality. It had been Hössler who had selected the women “volunteers” sent to the Monowitz brothel.8

  Physically the barracks in the panzer training school were a pleasant change for the prisoners; clean, airy white buildings set around asphalt squares dis‑

  persed among pleasant woodland. The Wehrmacht staff—now consisting of a Hungarian regiment—supplemented the SS guards and helped manage the prisoners. The rations they were given were better quality, but the quantities were pathetically inadequate for so many people. Gustav and his comrades were reduced to foraging potato and turnip peelings from the garbage bins outside the barrack kitchens—“anything to relieve the hunger,” he noted in his diary.

  In all his time in the camps, he had never been surrounded by so much tight‑

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  had kept him going was beginning to ebb away. What made him special? Why should he make it to the end when all these thousands had not or would not?

  In their own way, the Hungarian troops were as brutal as the SS. Most of the officers were well‑groomed, with pomaded hair, and had instilled in their mostly illiterate men an anti‑Semitic fascist ideology that was on a par with anything the SS could provide. They were callous and apt to shoot inmates for entertainment. Their main duty, aside from keeping the prisoners under general guard, was to protect the kitchens, and they would stand in the square between the barracks taking shots at the prisoners foraging for food, killing dozens of them; in the main camp it was the same, with hundreds shot each day.9 Some of the Hungarian troops retained a mystic devotion to the Nazi cause. One Jewish woman encountered a Hungarian near the perimeter of the camp; seeing her Star of David, he regretted that the work of exterminating the Jews had not yet been completed, telling her that Hitler would return, “and again we shall fight side by side.”10

  On the first night in Belsen Camp 2, Gustav stood vigil in the upper story of his building. Looking out the window toward the south, he saw the dark sky glowing orange. It looked to him as if a town—possibly Celle, twenty or so kilometers away—was in flames. Even as Gustav watched, it flashed and erupted with explosions. That wasn’t aerial bombing—that was a battle front.11

  His sinking heart began to rise. “I think to myself, now the liberators must be here soon—and I have faith again. I think to myself still, the lord God does not forsake us.”

  On April 12, with the tacit consent of Commandant Kramer, local Weh‑

  rmacht commanders made contact with the British forces advancing toward them and negotiated for the peaceful surrender of Bergen‑Belsen. In order to contain the epidemic of typhus, a zone of several kilometers around the camp would become neutral territory.

  In the barracks, Gustav noticed that most of the Hungarian soldiers had begun wearing white armbands as a token of neutrality. Even some of the SS were doing the same—including the camp leader, SS‑Corporal Sommer, whom Gustav had known in Auschwitz as “one of the bloodhounds.” At last Gustav felt sure that the prisoners would be handed over to the British with‑

  out bloodshed. “It is high time,” he wrote, because the SS “wanted to make of us a St. Bartholomew’s Night massacre under English illumination, but the Hungarian colonel didn’t want any part of it, and so they have left us alone.”

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  Two days later, on April 14, Gustav saw the first British tanks in the dis‑

  tance. In the barracks there was unconstrained joy, and the celebrations went on all night. Soon they would be set free.

  Captain Derrick Sington struggled to make himself heard over the convoy of tanks clanking and roaring along the road leading through the town of Win‑

  sen an der Aller. Following a race to catch up with the tanks and scout cars of the 23rd Hussars leading the advance, Sington had found the regiment’s intelligence officer and was trying to inform him of his special mission over the din of military traffic.

  Derrick Sington was commander of the No. 14 Amplifying Unit of the British Army Intelligence Corps. Equipped with light trucks mounted with loudspeakers, the unit’s role was to disseminate information and propaganda.

  His commanding officer had ordered him to proceed with the advance column of the 63rd Anti‑Tank Regiment, Royal Artillery, to the concentration camp at Bergen‑Belsen. That regiment would be establishing and taking control of a neutral zone surrounding the camp. The prisoners—or “internees” as the British were official y cal ing them—must not be al owed to leave the zone. Information from the Wehrmacht indicated a typhus epidemic in the camp, and it could not be allowed to spread into the areas behind the British front line. Once the camp had been secured, Captain Sington was to take his loudspeaker truck inside and make the requisite announcement to the inmates. As a German‑speaker, he would also act as an interpreter for Lieutenant Colonel Taylor, commander of the 63rd AT, who would be in overall command of the zone.12

  Yelling at the top of his voice over the clattering squeal of tracks and roaring engines, Sington explained all this to the Hussars intelligence officer, who leaned out of the turret of his tank with his hand cupped over his ear. He nodded and told Sington to fall into line. Sington jumped back into
his seat, gestured to his driver, and they pulled into the road, joining the flow of armored vehicles.

  Beyond Winsen, the column passed through open countryside that gave way to thick woodlands of firs, whose powerful scent mingled with the exhaust fumes and the stench of burning. The infantry advancing ahead of the armor were torching the undergrowth on either side with flamethrowers. There had been a tough fight for Winsen, with tanks lost to unseen German 88‑mm guns, 294265XGB_STONE_CS6_PC.indd 298

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  so they weren’t taking any chances today. If there were snipers concealed in the thickets, they’d soon be flushed out.

  Not far up the road, Sington saw the first warning notices—Danger Typhus—marking the perimeter of the neutral zone. Sington pulled over and was met by two German NCOs, who handed him a note written in bad English inviting him to meet the Wehrmacht commandant at Bergen‑Belsen. Mean‑

  while, the column of Sherman and Comet tanks carried on rolling.

  Sington followed them, and as the road swung eastward he spotted the camp—an enclosure of high barbed‑wire fences and watch towers cut out of the forest, flanking the left‑hand side of the road for about one and a half kilometers. Sington’s truck pulled off the road at the main gate, where he was met by a small group of very smartly dressed enemy officers: one in the field‑gray of the Wehrmacht, a highly decorated Hungarian captain in khaki, and a bulky, fleshy‑faced SS officer with a simian jaw and a scar on his cheek. This man proved to be SS‑Captain Josef Kramer, commandant of Bergen‑Belsen.

  The Englishman introduced himself. While they waited for the arrival of Colonel Taylor, Sington fell into polite conversation with Kramer. He asked him how many prisoners were in the camp; Kramer answered forty thousand here, and an additional fifteen thousand in Camp 2 up the road.

  And what kind of prisoners were they? “Habitual criminals and homosexu‑

  als,” said Kramer, looking furtively at the Englishman. Sington said nothing in answer to this but later noted that he had “reason to believe it was an incomplete statement.”13

  Their conversation was mercifully cut short by the arrival of Colonel Tay‑

  lor’s jeep. He ordered Sington to go into the camp and make his announcement, then roared on up the road toward Bergen.

  After a show of reluctance, Kramer allowed the barrier to be lifted, then at Sington’s invitation he climbed up on the running board of the loudspeaker truck, and they drove in through the gates. With Kramer giving directions, the truck passed through the first compound, containing the SS facilities, then on through the inner gate into the main camp.

  To Sington, who had tried many times to imagine what the inside of a concentration camp would be like, it was unlike anything he had pictured.

  There was a straight street through the center, with separately enclosed com‑

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  was suffused with “a smell of ordure” that reminded Sington of “the smell of a monkey‑house” in a zoo; “sad blue smoke floated like a ground mist between the low buildings.” The excited inmates “crowded to the barbed wire fences . . . with their shaven heads and their obscenely striped peni‑

  tentiary suits, which were so dehumanising.” Sington had been with the advance from Normandy through France, Belgium, and Holland, and had witnessed gratitude from many different liberated peoples; but the cheers from these skeletal, wasted ghosts, “these clowns in their terrible motley, who had once been Polish officers, land‑workers in the Ukraine, Budapest doctors, and students in France, impelled a stronger emotion, and I had to fight back my tears.”14

  He drove through, stopping his truck at intervals, the loudspeakers blaring out the announcement that the camp zone was in quarantine under British administration. The SS had surrendered control and would now withdraw; the Hungarian regiment would remain, but under direct command of the British Army. Prisoners must not leave the area due to risk of spreading typhus. Food and medical supplies were being rushed to the camp with all haste.

  It was greeted with explosions of joy. The inmates spilled out of the com‑

  pounds, surrounding the truck. Kramer was alarmed, and he wasn’t the only one. A Hungarian soldier began firing his rifle directly over the heads of the prisoners. Sington jumped out of his truck. “Stop shooting!” he ordered, pul ing his revolver, and the soldier lowered his rifle. But no sooner had the shooting stopped than, to Sington’s amazement, a band of men in prisoner uniforms armed with cudgels ran into the crowd, lashing and beating the prisoners with appalling brutality. Sington, who had no idea of the existence of kapos and block seniors, was stunned by this spectacle. One poor skeletal wretch was on the ground, but still the kapo kept up the rain of blows.

  When they arrived back at the main gate, Sington said to Kramer, “You’ve made a fine hell here.”15

  Sington hadn’t seen the half of it. His brief tour had shown him only the throng of survivors, and it would be a day or two before he finally discovered the burial pits, the crematorium, and the grounds strewn and stacked with thousands of naked, emaciated corpses.

  Pulling out of the gate, he turned his truck toward Camp 2, to repeat his round of announcements.

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  There had been celebrations the day before when Gustav saw the tanks in the distance. Today, the British column had come rolling up the main Bergen road, passing by the camp, and little seemed to happen. Then the loudspeaker truck arrived. Captain Sington’s announcement was drowned out by cheering.

  The prisoners in Camp 2, although in a dreadful state, weren’t nearly as wretched as those in the main camp. As soon as the loudspeaker truck departed, the lynchings began. Hundreds of men, exalted in their fury and encouraged by their strength in numbers, singled out the individuals who had tortured them.

  Gustav watched dispassionately as certain SS guards and green‑triangle block seniors were strung up or beaten to death. Gustav saw at least two murderers from Auschwitz‑Monowitz die and felt no pity or remorse for it. The Hungar‑

  ian troops made no move to intercede. That afternoon, when the killing was done, the remaining SS were made to remove the bodies and buried them the next day with their own hands.

  On April 17, the British began taking records of all the surviving prison‑

  ers in Camp 2, ordering them by nationality; Bergen‑Belsen had been trans‑

  formed into a displaced persons camp, and the inmates were being prepared for repatriation. Gustav remained with the Hungarian Jews; he’d made many good friends among them, and with his long experience of the camps they had chosen him to be a room senior.

  It was a liberation and yet not a liberation. Gustav and his comrades were no longer under the heel of the SS; the British brought in food and medical supplies, and they ate well and began to recover their health. It was very dif‑

  ferent from the main camp, where the inmates were in such a terrible state that thousands died in the weeks following liberation. Yet they were all still prisoners. Because of the quarantine, the Hungarian soldiers were under orders from the British to prevent anyone from leaving. As far as Camp 2 was con‑

  cerned, this was preposterous—the was no typhus here, and no need to keep the prisoners incarcerated. Gustav began to chafe, longing to experience freedom again after all these years.

  His first priority, though, was to let his family know that he was alive and well. He wasn’t the only one. The liberation of Belsen was a huge international story; there were newsreels and radio reports, and the papers were full of it.

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  the Nazis heard the reports and sent desperate inquiries. Periodically, Captain Sington’s loudspeaker truck would tour the camp, broadcasting the names of people whose families had inquired.16

  Gustav thought of Edith and Kurt. He hadn’t seen Edith since her departure for England in early 1939 and had heard no news of her since the beginning of the war. Kurt too had been cut off since December 1941. Gustav wrote a message detailing his whereabouts and block number. Providing Edith’s last known address in Leeds, he entrusted it—along with the thousands of messages from other inmates—to the British administration.17

  Meanwhile, the British got on with the enormous task of looking after the liberated people. The main camp was the first priority. Food and water were brought in, and medical staff began their work of trying to save as many lives as possible. Handling the dead blasted the minds of those who witnessed it. The corpses lay in heaps in the thousands, and the half‑dead, half‑living moved around them as if they weren’t there, stepping over them, sitting down to their scraps leaning against stacks of the dead.18 Great pits were excavated, dozens of meters long and several meters deep. At first the SS were forced to carry the dead into the pits by hand, jeered at and cursed by survivors; a few SS men made a run for the forest, but they were shot down and their comrades had to drag their bodies back. Into the pits they went, along with their victims.19 The task proved overwhelming in the end; there were just too many bodies to bury by hand, and the bulldozers that had dug the pits had to push the stacks of decomposing corpses into them. It took nearly two weeks before the last were buried.20

  The main camp was gradually evacuated, and the survivors moved to the clean, solid buildings of the panzer training school; the former Camp 2 was converted into a huge hospital, named Bergen‑Hohne. The transfer would take about a month, due to the weakness of most of the survivors. As the infected, insanitary, broken‑down wooden barracks in the main camp were emptied, they were burned down with flamethrowers.